II.— THE SERUM TREATMENT OF GLANDERS. 



In glanders, as in tuberculosis, attempts have been made to utilise 

 in treatment blood and serum from refractory animals, Malzew and 

 some other experimenters claim to have been successful in immunising 

 animals by injections of ox serum. MM. Chenot and Picq by thus 

 treating guinea-pigs rendered glanderous by inoculation with virus 

 taken from the horse succeeded in curing seven cases out of ten. 

 Similar attempts made by MM. Nocard and Leclainche failed. 



During the past two years I have treated with defibrinated ox blood 

 and serum, and afterwards with defibrinated blood and serum from 

 birds, several series of guinea-pigs which had been inoculated by 

 scarifying the skin of the flank or face and applying glanders pus. 

 The results were as disappointing as those in connection with tuber- 

 culosis. The injections did not seem to me to exercise any real 

 influence on the local lesions, or on the development of disease. In 

 the majority of cases they did not prevent extension of the ulcer, 

 enlargement of lymphatic glands, or production of visceral lesions. 

 In some cases the local ulcer healed, but this also occurred in a pro- 

 portion of the control animals. Such a result is not uncommon in 

 chronic glanders in the guinea-pig, and as the secondary lesions are 

 irregular in intensity and distribution, being sometimes confined to a 

 few granulations or small caseous centres, it is easy to understand why 

 certain authors came to believe in the efficacy of serum from refractory 

 animals. 



I attempted to prepare an antitoxic serum by the same methods as 

 had been followed in connection with tuberculosis. Turkeys were 

 intra-venously and hypodermically injected with sterilised glanders 

 cultures and mallein. These birds proved fairly sensitive to the action 

 of the glanders poison. Whilst they resisted large doses of tuberculin 

 and tubercle bacilli fairly well, they suff'ered much more from 

 repeated injections of mallein or of glanders bacilli. Nevertheless 



